First Exclusively Women-Owned Dispensary Opens in Las Vegas

Women-Owned Dispensary

Saturday afternoon at 4:20, a group of four businesspeople held a ribbon-cutting ceremony to mark the grand opening of Las Vegas’s newest marijuana dispensary. Although dispensaries are popping up all over the country, the thing that makes this one unique is that it’s the first exclusively women-owned dispensary in Las Vegas.

“Our primary goal is to have the patients . . . make sure they feel comfortable in our dispensary,” Brenda Gunsallus, one of the co-owners of the new dispensary, told reporters over the weekend.

“We all wanted to be in an industry that we felt like was very beneficial for people,” she added.

Although not all the co-owners have smoked pot before, they all see themselves as working to make accessible a potentially revolutionary form of medicine.

“I never want anybody to come in here and feel ashamed to buy a medication that they need,” Gunsallus said.

Sahara Wellness and its group of all female owners mark yet another step forward in the increasingly visible presence of women within the broad world of cannabis culture.

Female celebrities like Rihanna, Miley Cyrus, and comedians Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson have all been hugely public proponents of pot in recent years, helping dismantle the stereotype that pot is mostly a guy’s thing.

Last fall, a study found that while women still earn less per hour than their male counterparts across the board, the cannabis industry has managed to achieve an unusually high degree of gender equity.

While only 22 percent of all executives in the U.S. are women, the report found that 36 percent of all cannabis execs are female.

Breaking it down more specifically, 63 percent of executives in the cannabis testing sector are women, 48 percent of cannabis processing and edibles companies are headed by female CEOs, and 28 percent of marijuana investment firms have female CEOs.

Nick is a Green Rush Daily staff writer from Fort Collins, Colorado. He has been at the epicenter of the cannabis boom from the beginning. He holds a Masters in English Literature and a Ph.D. in cannabis (figuratively of course).